last year at this time, segev had run home from classes to find me comforting my mother over the phone. she was crying, i was totally in shock. i was worrying about the people i work with, especially devon, who used to take a path train in from jersey that went directly under the trade center. MY train went directly under the trade center. those are the streets i walk on every day, covered in the dust of...people. i couldn't process it. what if christy had been at TKTS, what if jenn had stopped at barnes and noble -- there was no way of knowing where anyone was, what was happening. it all seemed so remote, yet so much closer than anything ever had before.
segev and i sat, staring at the television for what seemed like forever but was probably only 10 minutes. segev, at one point, got up and threw something and kicked the couch. i understood. i asked him if he wanted to walk down to the hospital and try to give blood. he nodded sort of dumbly. we got ourselves together to walk outside.
the streets...there was absolutely no traffic headed down amsterdam, but the uptown lanes were packed as far as the eye could see. people were wandering, confused, trying to clarify what was really happening, what could happen next. periodically a police car, fire engine, ambulance, would rance in the downtown direction, and everyone's eyes sort of fluttered downwards. we knew where they were going.
hundreds of people crowded the steps of st. john the divine, waiting to be told when they could give blood. we were almost all turned away. there were too many of us. they told us to come back at 2 and try again, but i knew they weren't going to need us. everyone wanted to give blood, to do the only thing they could think of to help. but there weren't going to be any more people coming out of there. there wasn't anyone left for us all to give life to, even if we wanted to, so, so badly.
segev went to the physics building and found his friend yashar, the only person left in there. the three of us went to eat lunch at the west end. i was so paralyzed. i ate like two bites of my burger. i felt nauseous. i couldn't talk. i couldn't think of anything to say. and i remembered specifically thinking, "i hope yashar doesn't think i'm not talking to him because he's a swarthy middle eastern male." i had never met yashar before, but i could tell he was just as confuused, scared, lost as the rest of us. looking back, i love the fact that in the aftermath of the attacks, in upper manhattan, an iranian muslim and an israeli jew (albeit both pretty non-observant) had lunch together, and leaned on each other, in the way that men do (not showing that they're leaning, but still getting support just from the fact of sharing the experience).
the reason i was thinking about this, besides the obvious, is that yashar went to iran for the last half of the summer to visit his family and isn't back yet, even though it's the second week of classes. i know it's probably nothing. yashar is, by all accounts, totally brilliant and a total slacker, so missing classes probably isn't really a huge deal to him. but i'm so worried. i'm worried because i KNOW, we have the evidence at my place of business, we know how they treat men from the middle east trying to get into the country on a student visa these days. yashar doesn't deserve the hassle. yashar is honestly one of the sweetest people i've ever met in my life. and if he's stuck in some sort of bureaucratic limbo because of the color of his skin, the shape of his nose, the coarseness of his hair, it will break my heart.
come back soon, yashar. on this day, in this year, i miss having you around.
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